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August 2015 Vol. 52 No. 12

Part of the “Urban Life, Landscape, and Policy” series, this study challenges a longstanding notion that the environmental activism of the 1960s and 1970s was the exclusive province of whites, the educated, and the relatively affluent.  In a case study examining the inner cities of Baltimore, St. Louis, and Chicago, Gioielli (Univ. of Cincinnati Blue Ash College) has unearthed a “wave of environmental activism that swept America’s older, industrial cities” during this vibrant period undertaken by those most impacted—the residents.  Ongoing white flight from the inner cities left poor African Americans and place-bound working-class whites with a spate of environmental problems: ubiquitous urban blight, polluted air and water, nearly epidemic lead-based paint poisoning of children, and insensitively designed interstate highway systems that uprooted ethnically and racially vibrant communities.  The author reveals movements for racial justice conjoining simultaneously with grassroots environmental activism with varying degrees of success in addressing the myriad problems plaguing these particular cities.  Strategies and organizing structures that served activists during the civil rights struggles of the 1960s were used to challenge local, state, and federal bureaucrats and out-of-touch urban planners.  Some photos accompany the text.

--K. Edgerton, Montana State University at Billings

Summing Up: Recommended. Primarily for graduate-level researchers and above.